I officially despise airports. But more on that later...

The San Diego Comic-Con: The largest gathering of nerds in existence? I suppose E3 is a large contender, but considering Comic-Con is indeed based around comic books, it tips the scales. It's not ALL comics though, as there's an ever-growing game and web presence, with video game booths from Sony and Square-Enix, and website booths from Maddox and Newgrounds. Which brings you to me. This year is the first year that Newgrounds had its own booth. So me and and a crew of NG artists and users made our way to San Diego to represent the site. (and nerd it up)

Instead of breaking it down by day, like I usually do, I thought I'd do it different this time. Each day more or less consisted of the same thing, so I'm grouping everything together by sights/activities.

The Hotel

Luis and I shared a room at the Ivy Hotel, a fairly upscale joint in San Diego's downtown 'Gaslamp District.' Their motto is 'Excess cloaked in Luxury.' I couldn't tell you exactly what that means, but I was inclined to agree with them.

Seven pillows per bed = necessary

Fancy sink

Fancy Shower

Part of in-room minibar. Yes, that's a sex toy in the back

The Convention

The convention center was HUGE, and there's no way I could possibly describe all the things to see. Well, about 80% of the booths were comic-related, and I'm not big on comics, so that helped narrow my choices.

Outside the convention center

The Nerdian Sea

The Newgrounds Booth

Trippy Sci-Fi channel booth

Batman, made of legos

Chewbacca.... made of legos

Power Ranger helmets!

Tobin Bell, who plays 'Jigsaw' in the Saw movies

A very large Optimus Prime

American Dad cast script reading

The Costumes

What would Comic-Con be without comic-costumes?

Uh, the Lionsgate Nurses? Dunno...

Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law

Not sure about these gals either

You can't expect to NOT see this costume duo

No comment

Not actually the girl from Grindhouse, but one that looks like her AND had a prosthetic matchine-gun leg

Caveman Robot

Robot Smoke from Mortal Kombat

The Food

Oh yeah.. this wasn't just San Diego, this was downtown San Diego, where EVERYTHING is trendy, fancy, classy, and high priced. Whatever, I'm on vacation.

Bondi, the Australian restaurant

$20 for an organic chicken meal? Yes please

The swanky hotel rooftop bar

Mike's Mexican Restaurant

Hooters. Ok, so it wasn't ALL classy

Dick's Bar, which looked cool but was really lame

So there you have it. Four days of eating, drinking, meeting people, and being a complete loser. I knew a lot of people from the Mod Meets, but it was great getting to meet other NG artists like Swain, The Flash Bros, Doodler, Bomtoons, Rog, and more. Oh, and Ross, who is awesome to play in Tetris.

And let's not forget about those airports shall we? Ok, so the trip there was actually pretty good. 30 minute delay in Denver, I can handle that. But the return trip? Jesus. I got to the San Diego airport an hour and a half early, just because I have such bad luck with airports. Long story short I couldn't check in because I didn't 'pay for my ticket' even though I did. All of that added up to exactly one hour and 23 minutes of time wasting. I finally got my ticket seven minutes before my flight left the airport, still having to go through security which clearly had a '20 minute wait' sign posted. I waited in line till my flight left, just to humor them, then I ducked out to wait in line AGAIN to get a new plane ticket. The next plane was already delayed an hour but hey whatever, that's to be expected. So I ended up making a connection in Vegas instead of Pheonix, and got home about five hours later than I should have. I had to watch 'Fire Dog' on the return flight too, just to add insult to injury. Go look it up, I refuse to think about it ever again.

Next year I'm walking.